


Thrice Three Secrets, Thrice Again

by Val Mora (valmora)



Series: weaving 'verse [2]
Category: The Avengers (2012), Thor (Movies)
Genre: AU, Arranged Marriage, Asexual Character, Dysphoria, Gender-Neutral Pronouns, Genderqueer Character, Jotun Loki, Kid!Fic, Miscarriage, Misgendering, Multi, New York City, Other, Outtakes, Shapeshifting, Weddings, interworld relations, terrible first times, the universe sounds like your microwave
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-03
Updated: 2013-01-03
Packaged: 2017-11-23 11:15:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/621506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valmora/pseuds/Val%20Mora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Outtakes for <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/591496">To Unspool the Secrets of Our Selves</a>.</p><p>Twenty-seven secrets, and another for the secret-bearer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thrice Three Secrets, Thrice Again

**Author's Note:**

> As usual, if I'm fucking the gender stuff up, let me know.
> 
> There's a brief quotation from one of astolat's fics in here. It's homage.
> 
> Thanks to peridium for enthusing with me, and to the usual suspect for sitting through the rest of it. ♦

**ONE**

The small figure at Laufey’s side is shorter than Thor, clad in a loose shirt and trousers, red-eyed and blue-skinned. 

“May I present my second-born,” says Laufey, king of Jotunheim, there in Heimdall’s watch-room. “Loki. Laufeysbairn.”

Loki’s hair is long for a boy and short for a girl, but there’s something about the face, ugly as it is, and...

“My lady,” Thor says, as gallant as he knows how, and reaches to take his fiancée’s hand.

His fingers burn with cold, and he drops her hand, hurting. Her eyes are wide, with surprise he thinks, and she blows on her fingers, watching him warily. 

"That hurt!" he says, mostly to his father. 

"So it did," his father answers. "Perhaps next time you will think to ask permission."

Loki looks up at her father. "What is a lady?"

 

**TWO**

“Betrothed, you will not be marrying me for my docile temper or for my beauty. Should I not match strength to strength?” Loki says, eir voice thick with suggestion. 

Thor thinks of it then: Loki, beautiful and clever and hard to grasp, seated to his right hand on the dais in the throne room. It will be counter to protocol, but Thor is not his father, nor the rulers before him, and Loki will rule Asgard with him. Their lives joined, the realms speaking of them together, their names and deeds linked in every chronicle throughout time. Loki’s clever, wicked, skilful hands weaving magic in Asgard’s favor, on the battlefield beside Thor, both of them fighting in their own way, their honor each other’s. For the thousand, perhaps two thousand, years that Thor will reign. And each night the both of them returning to a shared bed, their bodies tangled and wanting for each other.

His fingertips are alive with the chill of Loki’s skin. “Yes,” he says, desperate to see it come true, and pulls Loki forward for a kiss.

 

**THREE**

Loki’s wedding finery is of finely-woven cloth, all in a blue-tinted white that makes em seem made of ice. The fabric has deliberately unraveling edges, strangely delicate against eir bare skin, as a reminder of Loki’s seiðr. Gold at eir throat, in eir ears and at eir wrists, eir distaff heavy at eir hip.

It is the right of men to wear weapons, at Æsir weddings. That Loki has that right, and none have contested it, is - Thor thinks em beautiful, always. But seeing em wearing all eir weapons, and knowing eir strength, makes em twice as lovely, the sight of em as powerful as any blow. 

It is flattering to watch Loki notice him, eir gaze flicking down his body once and then again. To know that Loki finds the sight of him in his new formal clothes different, and not unappealing.

Their marriage-gifts were decided by politics, not by their own choice, and certainly not by the politics of fondness. Loki’s marriage-gift – it was agreed that the word _dowry_ should not be uttered, as Loki has to emself the right to full possession of weapons, property, and loom – was land. Coastline in the north, by the mountains. Remote. Frozen, barren, poor fishing, and unclaimed prior to Loki’s betrothal. It is a useless gift. That Thor now has conjugal right to it is why it is useless. Loki did not renounce eir relation to eir family, only eir right to Jotunheim’s throne; in the event of divorce, Loki would return to Jotunheim, fully in possession of all eir wealth.

Asgard’s gift to Loki’s house is equally well-thought out: livestock unsuited to Jotunheim’s climate, fine cloth woven in summer weights. In coin it is a rich gift; in Jotunheim it is useless. More than that, Asgard giving cloth to a seiðr-worker’s house is mockery.

(The Jotun diplomat flatly refused the morning-gift that is customarily given to the wife in Asgardian marriages; inasmuch as it is payment to the new bride for her virginity, or for her sexual services, this custom is unknown in Jotunheim. Loki emself compared it to paying a whore, and then curled a hand against Thor’s throat and purred, _Besides, I expect you to be servicing me,_ and so Thor was uneasily content.)

The gifts exchanged, they join hands on a sword-hilt, and their hands are tied loosely together with a strip of cloth – of Loki’s weaving, subtly flickering with seiðr – and they are thus bound.

Loki speaks eir portion of the vows in a clear voice, while meeting Thor’s eyes, eir hand joined with his on the sword. The pommel is heavy, the silk brushing against his wrist; Loki’s palm is cold against the back of his hand. Thor is not sure, then or later, which of them is the one shaking, and as Loki never mentions it, ey must not be sure either.

 

**FOUR**

It is not right that Thor should be so uncertain on his own wedding night. It is not as though they are new to each other’s beds or bodies, and ever since their betrothal was announced, Loki has been viewed in light of _The Crown Prince will mount this soon enough._

Maybe it is that now their secret is no secret, nor should be: whenever they emerge from the bedroom, it will be assumed that their marriage is consummated, that they have known each other and are bound in flesh as well as by thread and honor. Loki’s fondness for whispering to him _And if your precious companions found us thus, would they not be shocked to see us rutting together_ – will mean nothing, because tomorrow they will have the eyes of all of Asgard looking upon them both, and every mind behind those eyes imagining Loki on eir back with Thor’s prick inside em.

In the bedchamber, where their clothing has all been moved since they dressed this morning, Loki sits down upon the bed and picks at the unfinished seams at the wrists of eir shirt, fraying them further. It makes flickers of blue light flash between the threads, magical static. Thor is unaccountably charmed by the gesture.

It is not, however, driving him to new heights of lust. If anything, he is tired. Loki, half-teasing and half-wicked, announced at table that they would both drink only water at the wedding feast, so that Thor could perform his conjugal duties. But it made him unable to join in his friends’ merriment, and loneliness does not beget desire in him. 

“Those clothes look well on you,” he says, standing by the dressing table. He is too restless to sit, and too tired to pace or to fight.

Loki tilts eir head to look at him. “Better than when they are off me, I hazard.” Ey lets go of the raveling threads and sets eir hands on the sheets. Those are finely made, in a deep green. Loki wove them on a large, heavy loom that was part of Frigga’s dowry. Loki swears there is no seiðr woven into them, but Thor suspects they are enchanted to stay cool, or to smell of frogs, or some other mischief. He has never slept between them, and Loki can hardly be said to be content with mundane weaving.

“You know how I think of you.”

Loki’s eyebrows rise a little further. “Do I now.” Ey slides back nearly a handspan onto the bed and lifts one leg, hooking a heel over the edge of the bed. The unhemmed edge of eir sarong slides up, revealing a dark swath of inner thigh.

Thor remembers Loki’s taste, salt-heavy. But he cannot say that he wants this, not now, not this moment. His body is still, unresponsive.

He looks away, half-ashamed.

Loki huffs. “If you desire me so little as that –“

“It is not that,” Thor says. “I am tired, that is all.”

Loki’s hand slips between eir own thighs, fingers curling. “If I am not increased in power when we go before the Court tomorrow, they will think the match has not been consummated.” Ey watches Thor’s face. “In the morning,” ey suggests. “Or if we wake during the night.”

“Yes,” Thor murmurs. He undresses, setting Mjölnir onto its stand near the bed, and slides between the sheets, next to where Loki lies, still clothed, and falls asleep.

***

He wakes before the sun is risen, Loki curled cold beside him. The sheets do not smell of anything, nor is he covered in boils. Loki is still there, eir breath whistling faintly through eir nose. Ey is still dressed for the wedding, eir bony knees bare against the sheets. He puts his hand over one and leans forward to kiss Loki’s forehead.

Loki doesn’t stir, so Thor closes his eyes again.

***

The sun is strangely bright through the windows of Thor’s quarters, a curling heat against his bare chest. There is a faint shuffling some distance away.

He opens his eyes and remembers: _I am married, and these are the quarters of the Crown Prince and Consort._ Loki is pacing along the floor while drop-spinning by hand, making thick yarn. Thor watches for a time, watching the spindle turn, Loki’s usually-ceremonial distaff resting across eir shoulder and heavy with clean wool.

“What is that for?” he asks finally, to Loki’s back.

Loki stays facing away. “I haven’t decided.” Ey turns again, eir bare feet whispering against the floor as ey slides eir feet. Dancing.

There was dancing, last night. Jotun warriors mixing in with the Asgardian court, all of them stiff and cordial to each other. Loki, eir hands placed lightly and neutrally against Thor’s, was smirking in that way that meant ey was pleased by both courts’ discomfort. Ey even held back from working seiðr in the patterns of the dances.

“What are you deciding between?”

Loki’s eyebrows rise. “You shall need gloves, when we tour Jotunheim.”

“Not with yarn that thick.” Thor is no weaver, but he knows enough, now, from hearing Loki fuss.

“A girdle, then, to tie shut a coat.”

“You would weave it, and I know how you dislike weaving with thick yarn.” He does not know what game Loki is playing, but if it pleases Loki, he can be content for a time.

“A scarf, that you will remember me even when you hunt,” Loki says, eir mouth beginning to curl with amusement.

“How could I forget you, when you hunt with me?” 

Smiling, Loki closes eir eyes for a moment, then slows and sets aside the spindle and distaff, kneeling up onto the bed, and then over Thor. One knee to either side of him.

“I haven’t decided yet,” ey says, eyes glittering. “That’s part of the power. All the potential, waiting to be released.” Ey is, of all things, still wearing eir wedding clothes. 

Thor watches a lock of hair fall out from behind eir ear and curles a hand at the inside of eir knee. Runs it up the back of eir thigh, under eir sarong, which gapes open. Loki is already half-hard, visible in the disrupted lines of the cloth.

“I would very much like to open for you in these clothes,” Loki says, only barely serious. “As I went to all the trouble of attempting to seduce you in them last night, and was rebuffed.”

Thor slides his palm along the back of Loki’s upper thigh. “Come, then.”

Loki rolls eir eyes. 

***

This is the trouble: Loki is, in this act, a virgin. Thor has had some success using his hand, before, but it is hardly the same, and Loki is tense.

“I will divorce you for failure to –“ Loki snarls, eir teeth gritted. Thor isn’t moving. He has, in all truth, barely even breached Loki’s entrance. Loki is busy not breathing from pain, because even after a climax from Thor’s tongue and opening around his fingers, ey is still too tense.

“It gives me no pleasure to hurt you,” Thor says, wanting to pull out and not daring, knowing that that, too, would hurt.

Loki whimpers faintly, clenching tighter yet around him.

“You will hurt, even after we are done,” Thor says, unnecessarily, and strokes gently at Loki’s back, above him. Eir eyes are closed.

“It will stop hurting once –“ Loki begins, pressing emself down upon Thor, and cannot finish. Thor winces. 

The rest goes in much that fashion. Loki finds no pleasure in it whatsoever, and Thor, barely. When he is seated fully inside Loki, ey makes a low noise, halfway between sobbing and sighing, and says, “It won’t work.”

Thor knows nothing of the mechanisms of seiðr. For him, there was only the overwhelming spread of lightning along his spine, feeling as though all the world was a circuit bound up with sorcery and mass and blood, and that he would break with the strain of conducting all of it. Loki enjoyed it then, of that much he is sure. And when he lay with women, they were none of them virgins.

What feels an eternity later, they are no longer joined. Loki is too sensitive and pain-wracked for Thor to pleasure em in any manner, so instead he lies there beside Loki, who is boneless and wide-eyed with shock.

Perhaps twenty minutes later, a servant knocks on the door to announce that he has left a meal in their sitting chamber, and then leaves. Loki sits up, hisses out a breath, and goes into the other room.

Ey does not return – this is no surprise – so Thor follows em. Loki is sitting naked on the couch, leaning over a large tray holding hot stew, a pot of mead, and fresh bread, as well as dried fruit and a savory cheese-and-vegetable tart.

“The stew is fish,” ey says preemptively, dipping a finger in and then licking it clean. “In the style of Fúllness.”

Thor tears off a chunk of the bread – heavy with wheat and honey, not the usual rye served during most of the year – and leans over to smell the stew.

It is not pleasant. He takes a step back, coughing.

Loki is grinning. “Vinegar and sea salt,” ey says happily, and dips eir fingers in – so besides smelling like a pisspot it is cold, too – pulling out a chunk of fish and drawing it into eir mouth, teeth crunching on the little bones.

Thor watches, half-disgusted and half-fascinated, the bread forgotten, as Loki picks out and eats the morsels of fish and the thick strips of seaweed. Using eir hands all the time. It is terrible manners, even for the Jotun table. He thinks Loki wishes to offend him, or to make him think em savage, but he is not certain.

At the end, ey swirls eir fingers around in the bottom of the pot, checking for scraps, and then licks eir hand clean and reaches for the bread. Pours them both cups of mead with eir spit-slick hand leaving smears of wetness on the ceramic.

Thor drinks. Sets the cup down. Loki watches him with hooded eyes and cuts a sliver of the savory tart.

“You can still divorce me,” ey says sweetly. “Your side of the marriage gifts might even not be forfeit.” Ey gestures between them, luxuriantly. “You could even likely claim the match unconsummated.”

Not with Loki wincing every time ey shifted eir weight, Thor thinks. Seiðr or no.

“But I do not wish to divorce you,” he says, “and you had only to deny me your hand, yesterday, to be free.”

Loki covers eir face with eir hands and laughs, great heaving breaths, unstoppable. Thor, confused, takes the opportunity to eat some more bread, sitting down beside em.

After a time, Loki calms, eir face fading from near-violet to its usual deep indigo. “You forget that our marriage was arranged for us by our parents,” ey says, “and that I’m a peace offering, a symbol of Jotunheim’s submission to Asgard.”

Loki reads too much into these things, seeing slights where none are intended, and symbolism in coincidence. In such cases it is better not to argue, only to apologize and try not to do again what ey found so offensive.

But then this means that Loki would not choose to be married to him, does not want it. And yet courted him, as neatly as any true lover would have. For what? His chest aches.

“If you do not desire this marriage, but feel constrained to it,” Thor says, “then I only ask that you seek lovers outside of Asgard.”

Loki’s eyebrows rise. “And what of heirs?”

He has thought on what his and Loki’s children will – would have been – like. Blue-tinted skin, tall and proud, with all of Loki’s inner depth and his own strength. A son first, to inherit, and perhaps a daughter next, to carry Loki’s seiðr. But not if Loki would not lie with him happily, and felt it only out of obligation.

“Baldr will have children,” he says.

“But not you?”

“Not if you do not wish me to share your bed.”

Loki’s mouth curls. “Where is this sense of honor from? I don’t remember you being so uncertain of your welcome before. Lost your confidence? Afraid of your own spouse?”

“No.” Thor sets his hand on the cushion because he does not want to undermine himself by touching Loki, but he needs something to hold on to. “It is true that this match was our parents’ idea. But I thought that you were happy to lie with and to wed me. If that is not so, and it was only out of worry that I would harm you upon our marriage… I would not hurt you, If you did not love me in return. If you felt that you wished to leave but could not.” He swallows.

Loki shifts away. “You would choose a sexless, heirless marriage.”

“I would.” It would be the only honorable thing _to_ choose. He already misses the feeling of Loki beside him, eir mussed hair and glittering bright eyes.

“You fool,” Loki says fondly, wrapping eir arms over his shoulders, eir fingers toying with the hair at the back of his neck, nails scratching faintly. He shivers, not with the cold of eir skin but with the sensation. “If I were not due to be deflowered and thereby possess greater seiðr when we emerged, I would make you wait a full month to fuck me properly.” Ey pushes him onto his back on the couch. “But as I do not have that month, I have made do with two minutes.”

Ey slides towards him on the couch, eir thigh pressing to the inside of his own. “Unfortunately,” ey murmurs, smile faint, hands chilled against his bare chest, “I desire you entirely.” Ey turns, settling easily between Thor’s legs, arousal growing against his belly.

 _And I you_ , Thor wants to say, though that isn’t it, isn’t it at all.

 

**FIVE**

Ey wakes only pleasantly warm, instead of overheated or kept unevenly cool by some seiðr half-broken by passion and the inattention of sleep. The pressure of another body against eirs, gentle-warm - 

Not Thor. Ey shoves back in the bed, eyes flying open, and sees the golden span of Thor’s body. Is he dead, to be so cool to the touch?

And then Loki sees eir own hands. Reddened, the only remaining blue a smear of green in the backs of eir hands from veins.

Loki closes eir eyes in horror. Made an Æsir. Ey feels sick, too shocked to make a noise. Violated, eir body not eir own. It is only pleasantly warm in the room, instead of overheated. Ey shivers with horror, feels an itch in eir skin, the fish stew thick in eir tightening belly. Loki will kill whatever weaver did this.

Fine. If this is to be the face ey wears for a time, better to know the scope of it now. Ey shifts to the edge of the bed, setting eir feet on the metal floor, which is - which is only smoothly comfortable, as it should be. Instead of cold, as it seems to Thor.

Ey opens eir eyes. Blue knees, thighs, sex. The overpowering heat of the room. Ey shivers with discomfort, thinks _red, warmth, summer,_ and watches red wash over eir skin. 

In the mirror, eir face is like something out of a nightmare: eir own bone structure, but all the wrong colors, the lines on eir cheeks and forehead smoothed away. Blue irises, not vivid like Thor’s but pale, pale as Jotunheim’s sky. 

The room is not too warm.

Ey clenches eir hands to still the shaking, and with an effort returns to eir own body, eir own face.

 

**SIX**

The onset of winter, with cool overcast skies and bitter wind, sweetens Loki’s temper, and Thor is glad of it. Only halfway through the pregnancy and already Loki is quicker to anger even than before, impatient with eir body.

Bent over in the library, a line of tension heavy in eir shoulders, Loki is the picture of frustration, and Thor does not know what to do, what to tell em, how to ease eir discomfort. He is thinking already that one child is enough, will be enough. One heir for Asgard. If the child is a girl, so be it: there is no law on Asgard that bars a woman from the throne. If his heir is in-between or neither, as Loki is, then that, too, will be fine. Will be made fine. 

Loki looks up as he approaches.

“What is it?” ey asks, voice light with ready barbs. “Have you come to ask my thoughts on some other triviality, or to question after my health, as though it were me and not the child you worried for?”

Thor swallows back the sting of Loki’s words. How could Loki know that Thor loves em above the stability of the realm? How could Loki know that Thor would choose em over the unborn one in eir belly? There is no gesture to prove his loyalties that he would take happily of his own free will. 

“It is late,” he says, not sitting. “I ordered a meal sent to our chambers, as you missed the noon meal and ate later, and then missed dinner again.”

Loki’s tension lightens. “I wasn’t hungry.”

“At least sit with me while I eat, then.” Thor has learned, in the last months, not to say _You are eating not only for yourself,_ and anyway it is false justification for his concern. It is that Loki, left alone for too long without meals, will eat nonsense foods, things not suited for Æsir or Jotun: earth, unspun wool, flax-thread, iron dust, rose thorns and thistle-pricks. Substances heavy in magical potential. 

“Have you never learned to feed yourself, then?” Loki says, but eir tone is fond. “Bring it here.”

Thor glances around, at the stacks of books, the scholars frowning at them for talking. “I would love nothing more, but you know I cannot.”

Eir fingers pressing into his arm as ey stands are painfully cold, not the liquid-air freezing of eir natural body but rather the winter temperature of the room, digging into Loki’s skin. No wonder ey is comfortable, Thor thinks, and shivers.

“Cold?” Loki asks, faux-solicitous, eyebrows raised in mock concern, and takes up his hand to kiss the center of his palm. “Come, let’s eat. I’m sure I know a way to chill you further.” 

And perhaps it is Loki’s Jotun-strangeness, or perhaps eir own willfulness, but ey is hungry still to have Thor in eir bed. Thor is overcome with it sometimes, these long months; that even heavy with child, and growing heavier yet, Loki still welcomes him, and at times insists.

 _I won’t say you have a duty to me,_ Loki said, once, the night late and the palace dark with the hour. Eir skin was a smear of shadow against white bedsheets. _You owe me only as much as I owe you. But I would,_ and here ey touched Thor’s cheek with thread-roughened fingertips, pressing close - eir belly was still only a little swollen, then - and gasped, breathless, into Thor’s shoulder, _Lie with me, beloved._

 

**SEVEN**

“And I have already begun looking for a wet nurse,” Frigga continues, her hands clever on the spinning wheel. The rotation of the radial spokes is dizzying.

“No need,” Loki says. The loom has had to be adjusted to make room for eir belly, and Loki does not care overmuch for the change, so ey has spent the last few months spinning and dyeing instead. Eir hands are already blue; if they are purple with red dye, or darker yet from green, it is no matter.

“Ah,” Frigga murmurs, as though Loki has made some faux pas. Loki doesn’t care. It would be tantamount to giving eir child up entirely to the Æsir.

+++

At least _Thor_ is enjoying these late stages of Loki’s pregnancy. He sleeps with one leg tangled with Loki’s, and during sex his hands and mouth linger on Loki’s widened hips, full belly, the increasing heaviness of eir growing breasts. 

He does not have to deal with the constant need to piss, nor the back pain, nor the swollen ankles – 

So when Loki says, _No wet nurse,_ and Thor asks, _Why not,_ Loki glares at him and says, _Because you think I will bear you another halfbreed monster so soon after this?_ and Thor, pricked, does not ask more.

Anyway, Loki thinks he will want to appreciate the changes to eir body. Those will fade when ey weans the little one.

+++

The labor is easy, especially for a first child. Only a few hours made into a pain-wracked haze. Feeling the tension in Thor’s hands as he waits.

If this were any other moment, Loki would suggest sex, to calm him. A useless thought. Eir whole body burns with tension, muscles out of control. Is this what it is like, to be the target of a spell? Loki is glad to be a weaver if so.

Thor’s hand is warm in eir own. All things grow warm, or cold. Entropy. Energy soup, when the cold becomes warm and the warm grows cool, and then exhausted everything sleeps forever. 

It is hard work, giving birth, Loki thinks, and lets eir eyes close. How can the universe even bear it.

There is static in eir ears, bright flashing lights, an awakening. Thor’s hand in eirs, his voice like the roaring of wind and water and thunder, heavy and hot with some strange emotion.

“You’re very loud, you know,” Loki says to him, turning eir closer ear into the pillow. “And also very warm.”

Thor makes a noise. Loki cracks an eye open. He’s seated now, face buried in his hands, shoulders shaking. Why is he laughing?

“I think the Prince is right to be loud,” the Jotun medic says, sounding tired, “As you were most recently dead, for approximately thirty seconds, as the baby crowned.”

“Ah,” Loki says. That explains the ringing in eir ears. Radiation. Perhaps soon ey will learn how to turn off eir ability to sense it. “Well, it wasn’t permament.”

Thor takes eir hand and presses his cheek to eir palm, his hands resting atop eirs to hold it there. “You were dead,” he says, and his voice does not break. Loki would be proud of him if ey had the energy.

+++

A week after the birth and Loki is…beginning to feel emself again, by which ey would mean that ey will never feel like eir old self again. Ey can feel truth and lies, the probability of reality, bending in the air around em. What people know and don’t, like crackling static, in counterpoint to the singing light of the stars, and matter and energy spinning on while the things that made them are gone.

The doctor told em, _Your child is both you and your husband, and you know as well as I that there are few enough of mixed blood to know what ailments your child will suffer,_ and that rang with a false note, a not-unpleasant harmony. 

Untruths are like singing, and truth blares itself unwanted into eir ears. Thor is a cacophony of wrong notes, out of tune with all the universe but his compatriots.

Only Ilmr is silent to eir new senses, even with all eir crying. Eir little one has no sense yet of truth or lie, Loki supposes. Ey holds em close, comforted, and hums long notes in harmony with Asgard’s sun instead of singing lullabies.

 

**EIGHT**

Loki knew eir second child was dead long before it slithered its way out of eir body, half a year early, limbs like a fragile doll’s.

This is not a secret. Nor is it a secret that there are those at court who say that the lost one would have lived, that Loki killed it. After all, the Jotun will kill babes within them, if the child is unwanted, or inconvenient. This is true, too, and Loki has no shame of it.

(Ey does not say, _How many of you who say these things took more than merely victory during the war, and would be embarrassed to have had a half-Jotun bastard come to Court accusing you of paternity, and of rape?_ )

But it was not eir choice for the child to be dead.

Ey wove a piece of cloth, white threads spun and dyed by eir own hand, black for the warp and red for the weft, trying to form the life by sheer effort, and thought it would work, could feel the life within em holding steady - 

And then one night all the warp-threads snapped, and two nights later the child was gone, though still within em.

While Thor slept, worn with grief in their marriage bed, Loki rose, eir belly heavy and silent, and wove emself a passage into the lands of the dead, for to try to bring the lost one back.

At the gate stood a pale-skinned Jotun, half eir face nothing but bone, one side of eir chest full-breasted, as though a recent parent, and the other flat. One hand held together by tendons.

“My giver,” ey said, standing before the gate, “This realm is not open to you.”

Loki did not flinch at the name. Ey had heard, even in Asgard, what children ey had given to the weaver of the iron wood. “Then you know my purpose,” ey said.

“The child is beyond your reach, and well of it.”

“And that’s for you to judge, I’m sure.”

“You cannot make its physical body whole, not by seiðr and not by your own flesh: better to leave here, and let your child know only wholeness, in this land which is only spirit.”

Loki closed eir eyes. “Not by seiðr and not by my own flesh,” ey said.

“Nor by the flesh of others,” added Angrboða’s child.

Loki looked at em again. “You do not know what you ask me to do.”

“I do.” Eir lips, on the fleshed side of eir face, tilted upwards. “But you cannot give the child the gift of life no matter what you barter, or what trickery you work, or what you weave. You can collapse the wavelengths of possibility, Loki Laufeysbairn, would bring the end of all things and then find a way to save us: but even you cannot change what has already passed in this world. Try again in the next cycle.”

Loki set a hand on the fleshless white bone of eir jaw, feeling neither warmth nor cold. “You are dead.”

“I am immortal,” ey corrected, and did not say, _They are the same_. All the worlds end, and will be remade. 

“Let me -” Loki began, but a cool hand pressed over eir mouth.

“It is better not to.” There was kindness there. 

Loki looked away. “I can’t accept this.”

“I do not see what acceptance has to do with it,” ey said. “You are not the first to lose a child, and to be helpless against it. What is it to me, the anger of the living? I do not minister for them. Find me when you have come to my realms forever at last, and then you will meet your lost one. But until then, goodbye.” Ey pushed Loki away from the gate, and Loki fell, waking with a jolt before eir loom, eir belly hard and tight with too-early labor.

 

**NINE**

Loki's hand against his throat is heavy, hot with eir form changed to Æsir gold. Thor, half-helpless, his entire back sweat-slick where Loki is pressed against him, pushes back into their joining.

“Beloved,” Loki murmurs, voice heavy, “I would counsel patience, but I know already you have none.”

He heaves in a breath. It thrills something within him, to hear Loki call him _Beloved_. Thor has called em that since - since their marriage, because to use the endearment before that would have been unseemly. But it has only recently become returned, and Thor glories in it, in the knowledge that Loki has chosen it, has chosen _him_. 

“It is a pity,” Loki hisses, and there, a hitch in eir breath, giving away eir pleasure, “that no matter how often you open yourself to me, you will not -” another breath, “have children of your own.” 

Thor closes his eyes, concentrating on the slide of Loki within him. “I would bear it less gracefully even than you.”

Loki laughs. That is changed, the sound of eir laughter. It has grown clearer, and is strange with it: _This is not my spouse,_ Thor’s ear recognizes, even though it is still Loki, only shifted to the summer-warmth of an Æsir form.

“You would not,” Loki agrees, “and I would have joy of it, to know your discomfort, and then to ease it...” Eir hand slides down his chest, coming to rest over his belly. Thor moans through a smile.

“Or we would be with child together, both of us pregnant.” Loki exhales against the back of his neck, kissing the jut of Thor’s spine. “It is considered romantic, you know.”

Thor raises an arm, reaching behind himself to pet at Loki’s hair. Lets his head tilt back and feels the slide of Loki within him, Æsir-warm, his own beloved made strange and new to him. 

Loki stills. “If this is not your pleasure -”

“It is,” Thor says, slow. “But if I cannot know you by your voice and by your touch in this form...this body is a stranger to me.”

Loki huffs out a laugh and shivers against him, all eir skin growing cold. The sense of em within him is different, like this: more intense, and the chill of eir body against his is familiar.

“Like so,” Thor says, and cries out at the feeling of Loki beginning to move again.

 

**TEN**

Ilmr takes up the sword when ey is in eir third century. Ey is clumsy with newness, and not entirely eager, but the sword is the first weapon of any warrior of noble rank, and so ey persists. That ey would rather spend eir time in the garden, eir toes squishing in the dirt, is of no real relevance. 

In the mornings, at breakfast before practice, Syn and Róta wave their tiny, fat arms at em, and smile. They will be talking soon, and already babble senselessly, curling up together like the hunting pups. Róta is bluer than Ilmr, a lovely shade nearly as intense as eir bearer, but Syn is pink as their father, and perhaps even paler. Uncle Baldr says that it will be Ilmr’s duty to protect eir siblings. 

Ilmr isn’t sure that Syn and Róta will need protection, but for now, maybe ey can be enough.

 

**ELEVEN**

Jane sees the children in time to swerve, the van skidding wildly on the dusty soil. She runs out of the car, towards where they are sitting, and kneels down – 

“Are you all right?”

This is when she realizes that one of them is blue with red sclera. It takes a moment to notice she – he? – she – the child, is talking.

“This isn’t Jotunheim,” they say, sounding frustrated.

The other child, pale-skinned and human-looking, clambers up to…their, feet. Both of them look to be about five or six years old. “Who are you?” they say, looking down at her, and then, “Please don’t kneel; Ilmr’s the Heir, not me.”

 

**TWELVE**

All in all it is very lucky that Jane met Syn and Róta before she met Thor; he is very handsome, and entirely charming, and what girl doesn’t dream of meeting a gallant prince (or princess, she supposes)? So it’s just as well that she knows he’s married with children before she meets him, especially when he asks after her research and shows interest and a little of the required background knowledge.

“I’m amazed you understand even this much,” she says, when he becomes lost by her explanation. “Most humans don't understand much of anything about these things.”

He shrugs, smiling easily over the table at her. Behind her, Róta gives a little shriek of excitement, and Darcy laughs. 

“My spouse is a powerful sorcerer,” he admits, “and knows much of such things; my own knowledge is from what ey has explained to me.”

“Where is ey?” After nearly two weeks of using gender-neutral pronouns for Syn and Róta, she’s almost used to it.

“Still in Asgard,” he says, and his smile warms, just a touch. “Ey would be glad to meet you, I think, and it is time that the children and I should go home. May we visit you again?” He rises from the chair.

She follows suit. “Of course!” What else could she say? They’re super-powered extraterrestrial beings with advanced scientific knowledge. Of course she wants to see them again. And maybe meeting his spouse will keep her from being quite so attracted to him. She sighs internally. Gay or taken. It never fails.

 

**THIRTEEN**

“As you can see, with the Jacquard loom, the punch cards were fed through the machine, allowing complete control of the setting of the warp threads,” the guide says, “which meant more complex designs were possible.”

In the back of the tour group, a tall Asian-looking woman in dark clothing and a blue scarf makes a noise akin to a whimper.

“Beloved,” she says, leaning over to whisper in her husband’s ear.

The man, broad and blond and somehow familiar without being recognizable, a thin string bracelet tied around one wrist, grins. “A new toy?”

“Toy?” she repeats, eyebrows rising. “Only as much as -”

“I am sorry.” The Prince of Asgard reaches to rest a hand on his spouse’s upper arm, holding em close. “I only meant - do not make me think of it, or else I shall -” He heaves in a breath.

Loki does not lean away from him. “With both our pleasures.”

 

**FOURTEEN**

Róta is the little wild one, the brash one, the one who was made for command; Loki meant to have two children for Thor’s throne, and keep the third for emself, but of course that is not what happened. Ey and Syn are too alike to bear each other’s company fondly, and Róta is too much eir father. 

Still, that is not to say Loki is unmoved to find Róta curled up behind the loom in the Prince and Consort’s chambers, hiccoughing through eir tears and wiping at eir eyes.

Ey kneels on the floor, sitting down beside em. “What happened?” ey asks. There is no one else there; Thor is in council, which as it concerns diplomacy towards Jotunheim, Loki has declined to attend, even as shadow.

Róta buries eir head against Loki’s chest. “I fell in practice,” ey says. 

“Oh?” It cannot be just that; Loki has seen Róta fall before, and Thor falls often in sparring practice, rising laughing to his feet again. He is the prince, and the foremost warrior of Asgard, but there are warriors who still can best him on the training field. Róta knows that there is no shame in losing to a superior foe, nor even to the fact that even great fighters sometimes make mistakes. So this must be something else.

“I did not –“ ey sniffles, gasping, “It was dumb and I saw it coming and I looked stupid, and everyone was watching and it hurt and –“

“Oh, my brave one,” Loki sighs, and gathers Róta to em, Róta’s little legs folding into eir lap, sweet-sticky arms wrapping around Loki’s neck. “Surely you’re not the first to embarrass yourself in front of everyone.”

“But they can’t help it,” Róta whimpers, smearing snot into Loki’s shirt. Loki pets eir hair, traces the faint clan-lines on the shell of eir child’s ear.

“Could you have?”

“Yes!”

“Well, then.” Róta is nearly Jotun-cold, comforting. “Then they know that you are like them. You see your father fall in practice, sometimes even when he has no opponent. It is no shame, only cause for laughter.”

“It’s not the _same_!”

“Ah, well.” Róta has grown from the bundle Loki’s arms are accustomed to. “Did you leave early?”

Róta nods.

“Would you like to eat lunch with me?”

Another nod. 

“Very well. But you need to go to afternoon lessons.”

Róta whines mournfully. Loki strokes at eir back and shifts a leg to keep it from falling asleep.

 

**FIFTEEN**

Syn’s first attempt at spinning, with eir bearer, is a disaster. It ends in tears and screaming, and so ey curls up against eir father’s chest and weeps softly with it. Trying to tie back eir own hair led to eir whole family only being able to tell the truth for the better part of a week, and of course eir bearer had hated it, had been bitter with displeasure. Had been short with em.

“Grandmother can teach you,” eir father says, petting eir hair. “She doesn’t mind having to tell the truth, and I don’t either. And Róta should have known better,” he adds, to make em giggle.

So ey goes to the weaving chambers, and sits at eir grandmother’s side.

“This is wool,” Grandmother says, holding a fluff of it. “It comes from sheep.” She baa’s. “Remember the lambs in the winter?”

Syn nods. “Yes.” 

“When we cut off all their hair in the spring, and then wash it, we get wool. To turn it into thread, we have to spin it.” She takes a clump of it and twists. It comes together, turning into a lump, and then she twists some more. A thumb-joint’s length worth of wool thread. “You try.”

By the end of the month, Syn is spinning with a drop-spindle, and mostly not losing control of it. All in quiet places: the weaving rooms, eir own bedroom. Not in public, not as eir bearer does, spinning and pacing through the gardens.

That winter, when Syn goes out into the gardens to see Ilmr, who is planting bulbs for the far-off spring, ey sees an old grey-haired woman, with sticks in her hands, working yarn into cloth in the shade of some fir trees.

Ey sits down and thinks of going back to spinning, there in the garden, but keeps glancing at the stranger. Syn has never seen her at court before.

After a time, the woman is looking back at em, and smiling. “Well-met, hunting-child.” 

Syn freezes, but the woman lets go of one needle, waves a hand dismissively. “I am not your bearer. It is a good kenning for a weaver and truth-seeker.”

Syn straightens eir shoulders, preening. “I am learning how to spin,” ey says, newly brave. 

“Are you now?” The woman sets aside the needles. “Show me.”

Syn takes out eir drop-spindle and goes to start it, but in eir excitement everything unwinds. In frustration and embarrassment, ey begins to cry.

“There is no shame,” says the woman. “Here, let me show you my knitting. I think you will like it better than you like your bearer and grandmother’s way of doing things.” She puts Syn’s hands around the needles, then closes her hands around Syn’s. Continues her work.

Her hands are very cold, but not painfully so. Like coming in after playing in the winter snow, or when Róta is upset. 

The shifting of the yarn along the needles makes little green sparks flash. The cloth begins to tint green-lit beneath Syn’s hands as rows grow into place.

“You are very powerful,” says the woman, absently, still knitting. “Your bearer will be proud.”

“What is this?” ey asks. “What are you making?”

“Chains,” says the woman, pointing to the knotwork rising from the cloth. 

“Why?”

“There is a wolf who would eat everything ey could, but should not be killed, even if Odin on the throne of Asgard commands it. So I am making something to bind em, so ey cannot hurt anyone.” 

Syn has always thought wolves were beautiful, even if they do like to eat chickens and sheep. “Is ey a Jotun wolf?”

“In a manner of speaking,” says the woman, and finishes off the row. “I think I hear your sister calling.”

“I don’t have a sister,” Syn says, but allows emself to be nudged off the woman’s lap. “Will you teach me to knit on my own?”

“I don’t know if I will be back to teach you, though I would like to,” says the woman. She tucks a lock of hair behind one ear, and folds up her knitting, tucking it away into a pocket in her cloak. “Be brave, hunting-child,” she says, “and tell your bearer you wish to try knitting instead of weaving, when the time comes.”

“I will,” Syn promises.

+++

When ey is most of the way through eir third century, and receives eir first loom, ey says to Grandmother, “I want to knit instead.”

Grandmother tilts her head. “Very well,” she says. “I have no objections, but you must ask your bearer first.”

So Syn tells em. Eir bearer goes pale, then flushes violet. “Who told you to ask this?”

“A woman in the garden, a long time ago. She knitted, too.”

“What was she knitting?”

“Chains.”

Eir bearer flinches.

“I must speak to your father,” ey says after a moment, and looks away. Syn can tell a lie when ey sees one that badly done.

“Please?”

“I don't like repeating myself.”

“Please?”

“I will answer in two days.”

Syn goes away, content in eir victory. After all, eir father wouldn’t say no.

 

**SIXTEEN**

Loki sits in a garden bench and watches Ilmr dig in the dirt. Ilmr’s hands are rough, soil beneath eir nails, the smell of greenery and earth clinging to eir skin. Ilmr will likely only ever have skill with seiðr in the manner Thor does: one specialty, and powerful with that single skill, useless at anything else. Loki does not mourn it overmuch; ey is wicked enough that ey would be jealous to bear a child more powerful than emself.

“Asgard is young,” Ilmr says finally. “It has had few rulers, since it was made.”

“Yes.”

“And none of them queen,” Ilmr continues. “Do you think that Asgard would accept a ruling queen?”

Loki breathes out, smoothing the line of eir coat around em. “A ruling half-Jotun queen?” 

Ilmr’s shoulders tense. “Yes.”

“It is not as though your siblings would be any less offensive to the same minds that would seek to oust you.” Ilmr is built along the lines of Æsir men, with broad shoulders and narrow hips, but shorter than many of eir compatriots, with a middle-pitched voice, hair worn long to accent the softer lines in eir face. And, well, only time will tell in what manner ey - she? Loki tastes the pronoun, unused to using it for eir firstborn - can or will have children.

“No,” Ilmr agrees.

“So you might as well call yourself by the title you like, and outsmart, cow, or kill those who object.”

Ilmr pushes some seeds a little more deeply into the soil. “Perhaps not the last; it might forment rebellion. But yes. I think I could do that. Thank you.”

“I can only hope that you will allow me to be present to watch their faces when you say it.”

Ilmr smiles, faintly. “But of course.”

 

**SEVENTEEN**

Ilmr rides with the Valkyries for a decade after she is officially named Heir. The uniform must be customized to fit her broad shoulders, thick arms, narrow hips; but she has padded her bosom since she realized she would not grow breasts without children, and so that much fits. 

She slides a hand over the armor, feeling the links ripple against her skin, and looks in the mirror. 

She is – she does not look as she would have chosen, if she had her bearer’s gift for shape-changing. She would soften her cheeks, widen her hips, disarrange the lines of her body. But like this, in the armor, she looks nearly as she would wish. Strength without brittleness. Femininity without compromise. 

She has her father’s arms and her bearer’s leanness, and her hair pulled back by electrum-and-jet pins shaped like ravens. More than a few men, and women too, have fallen silent when she turned her head and showed them. Ravens are the ancestral sign of the royal house of Asgard: to feast on battle, and be enriched whether there is peace or war.

She takes no lovers from among the Valkyries: they are her warriors, hers to command. It would be wrong to raise one up from the rest. Better to choose a match from outside Asgard, or one outside her direct chain of command.

She settles the pins more securely in her hair, buckles up her cloak, takes up her helm, and goes out to command the troops. Like all the Heirs of Asgard before her.

 

**EIGHTEEN**

The Asgardian consulate is a gleaming tower in the middle of New York City, all soaring penile substitutes and alien Art Deco. It ends up being about four blocks from Jotunheim’s, which everyone agrees is just as well, because it is generally considered that the Jotun building is more beautiful, with its fractal ornamentations resembling frost on windows, and flat planes mixed with jagged edges.

Syn refuses to stay in the royal suite in the upper floors there while ey is in college. It’s too far, first of all, and how would ey have friends over, and besides that _even if_ the rent is free, the security procedures would be a nightmare, and what would ey even eat, there are barely any grocery stores around.

This seems to persuade eir parents, who even decline to buy an apartment building and instead set em up with a stipend for textbooks and rent and so on, and allow em to live nearer the university.

Of course, this all goes to hell the moment eir new friends during orientation hear eir name, which isn’t even fair because Syn is going by Lokasbairn, not Thorsbairn, and so shouldn’t be recognizeable.

 _I will change my name,_ ey decides, _when I have reached eight hundred years. Syn…something. A placename. Ravnholt. Seidness. Something only the Icelandics will know._

That is, however, going to be a long time yet.

 

**NINETEEN**

The interworld conference of Syn’s first year of university, ey meets eir parents at a little Japanese restaurant in Lower Manhattan for dinner. Eir father the King is wearing a suit, one that his aides presumably picked out for him, as it fits better than Syn would have expected. A red tie – what else? – and a pin at his lapel, the royal raven. His hair bound back. He carries no weapons.

He hugs em tightly, first, his hands warm against eir back, and then eir bearer’s hands are cool against eir cheeks, lips pressed to eir forehead.

“My hunting one,” eir bearer says fondly, and releases em. 

Eir bearer is wearing a pale-skinned guise, black-haired and grey-eyed, wrapped up in a suit of far higher quality than the King’s. French cuffs held closed with opal chevrons, and Syn knows better to think that the loose threads at the end of the scarf around eir bearer’s neck are _tassels_. A distaff disguised as a cane leans against eir chair.

With eir bearer in this guise, Syn almost feels like eir parents’ child.

+++

“Where were you?” asks Syn’s roommate, when ey returns to the apartment.

“With my parents,” ey says.

“No shit?”

Syn rolls eir shoulders. “They were in town on business.”

“Cool. How was it?”

“Fine.”

“They must’ve been happy to see you.”

Syn clenches eir fingers in the thick hand-knit of eir scarf. A medium grey, like eir coat and eir eyes and, eventually, all eir clothes. Only the sharp raven-black of eir hair and the bright red slash of eir mouth are remarkable about em.

A weaver who weaves colorlessly. It is best that Syn has a mind suited to the shifting sharp edges of the law, then, for ey certainly has no other claim to expertise. Not like Ilmr, Loki’s favorite and the heir, who is quiet and pleasant and breaking every gender norm that Loki chafes against; not like Róta, the warrior and _Thor’s_ favorite, who was born to sit at Ilmr’s right hand as her military counsel.

“Yes,” ey says. “My parents love me very much.”

 

**TWENTY**

Róta's third visit to Jotunheim after Grandparent Laufey's death, ey comes upon Sivor in the gardens at Court. Sivor is collapsed on an iron-wrought bench, looking at a silver tree, eir hands empty.

"Róta," Sivor murmurs.

"I didn't see you. I can leave."

"No." Sivor waves em over. "It might even be good luck that you came at this moment. Sit for a while."

They are less than five centuries apart in age, close enough to feel as cousins, far enough that Róta spent much of eir childhood idolizing Sivor. Sivor is short for a Jotun, though hardly as short as Loki; and thin-boned, better with light, quick weapons. Ey carries iron, rather than ice, in defiance of it. To prove emself worthy. 

Róta sits down beside em. “So?”

Sivor slides eir hands along eir thighs, slow and meditative. “As my bearer sits now upon the throne, I am officially Heir,” ey begins, “and I have no body-siblings.”

“It’s not that great.”

Sivor plays with a fold of cloth at eir knee. “I have no interest in sex, nor do I wish to bear children of my own.”

Róta hisses out a breath between eir teeth. Difficult. Any true heir would have to be of Sivor’s own body, though there have been exceptions made, if the child was recognized, and of a long-standing relationship. Laufey’s direct line would end. Loki renounced eir right to the throne of Jotunheim when ey was married, while Helblindi was not of Laufey’s body. 

"You could adopt," ey suggests.

"And let some other house's child take the throne, bringing new alliances to bear among the fiefs? Who could I choose? Not from Langness." Whence eir giver Aurnir hails, and where eir sibling Leirvor will be chief in time. 

Rota licks eir lips. "Choose some orphan from the ranks."

Sivor makes an unhappy noise. "There are those who would object."

"Ignore them. Cow them. Force their admiration and loyalty."

Sivor laughs. "You are like your bearer when you talk politics."

Rota shrugs, at ease. "My parents are a matched set. It is no shame to resemble them both."

"No," Sivor agrees, and then, musing, "It seems wrong that the throne of Asgard should be destined for the ruler's half-Jotun heir, when there is no other blood on our throne."

"Better than half. Odin's mother is said to have been Jotun." Rota closes eir eyes. "That is not commonly considered, at Court. Odin and my father both being so golden."

Sivor folds eir hands. "A love match?"

"I do not know."

"If I would not be divorced for not consummating the match, I might look to Alfheim, then, to avoid marrying too close to my own blood."

Rota grins. "Next cycle, our houses shall not be family, I am sure."

Sivor takes eir hand, holding it between both eir own. "That is a shame," ey says. "Why should the Æsir and the Jotun not be on the good terms we have forged for ourselves? Without your parents' labors we might be at war again, and I have no hunger for that. No," Sivor says, "Cousin, I love you too dearly to wish we were not of the same blood."

 

**TWENTY-ONE**

The summer of the Twentieth Interrealm Conference, the British tabloids publish in lurid detail photos of Syn's parents engaging in conjugal relations.

Syn finds this out when some of the SJ bloggers ey knows post entries talking about the photos as an infringement on privacy, and who even knows if it was really cheating; the current Crown Princess of Japan is well-known to be in a happy poly relationship, and who knows what the King of Asgard and his Consort have agreed. Consenting adults.

Despite emself, Syn follows the link to the article and only has to read the headline and look at one photo, not even the raciest one, to know the contents.

The lead photo is of two figures in an alley, backlit by sodium light. Kissing. Eir father’s hair is mussed around dark-skinned hands, the edges of the other’s shirt sleeves half-unravelled.

Eir father’s body is wrapped intent into eir bearer’s.

Syn looks away. It is one thing to know, marrow-deep and inalieable, that eir parents love each other. It is another to see it enacted.

 _Get your PR people on this,_ ey writes to eir parents, linking the article, and then makes a short blog post linking to the original article, eir own commentary only reading, _in Earth's mythology Loki was a trickster deity._

The statement released by the Citadel’s press liaison is along the lines of _No comment,_ which is perfectly incriminating and has the gossip mags shrieking for about a week. Then they shut up because Khadija Liu says something clever in front of a microphone and everyone is debating it. At least until the Asgardian King and Throne-Consort make an appearance at some diplomatic event or another, and a reporter gets close enough to shove a microphone in Loki’s face and ask, _What do you think of your husband’s infidelity?_

 _Oh, I couldn’t say,_ Loki says thoughtfully, catching eir husband’s arm. _I have such trouble believing my eyes sometimes,_ and then kisses Thor full on the mouth, shockingly intimate even as eir whole body seems to melt away into another. The person from the photograph.

It is, of course, caught on video. Syn is forced to sit through it, because a couple of eir roommates’ friends want to watch the news, and is completely unsurprised that the talking heads’ commentary afterwards is on how gross the shapeshifting looked, how it shouldn’t be allowed, is wrong. Syn walks out. 

 

**TWENTY-TWO**

A decade after Laufey’s death, the western fiefs of Jotunheim rise up in rebellion, and there is war.

Asgard declares its support for the legitimacy of the current Throne, Býleistr, and helps supply the defending forces. There are things said at Court, then, of which Thor is not proud. _What is it to us if they kill each other? One ruler there is the same as the next,_ or worse, _Would we be shipping iron and wheat between worlds if the King wasn’t getting his prick frozen?_

Loki hears these things, Thor is sure. Is certain of it, once Loki sits on his hips and rests eir hands low on his bare chest and says, “Did you ever meet Imgerd?”

“No,” Thor says, “but I heard well what you said in council.”

“I’m biased,” Loki tells him, quietly.

“And I have met Býleistr.” He reaches up to hold Loki’s forearms, feeling the faint chill of eir skin. “I’m not afraid to displease you.”

“But you would rather not.”

“If I had declared support for Imgerd, what would you have done?”

Loki traces aimless lines across his chest. “Left our bed. Gone to Jotunheim.”

“But not with the children?”

“No.”

Not divorce, then, but military support. Loki before their marriage would have been a great military advantage; now, after children, ey is such a disincentive to war that Thor sometimes thinks his throne is stable only thanks to the nothern vassals’ fear of em.

“This was the idea, you know,” Loki says carefully. “In having us marry. That it would create a tie between our lineages. Insurance for the ruling house.”

“Býleistr is a good ruler,” Thor says.

“Hmm.” Loki leans forward, combing eir fingers through a few loose locks of Thor’s hair on the bed, and then, deliberately, sets eir hand over Thor’s throat. Not hard enough, nor in the right place, to hurt, but enough to restrict his breathing. Uncomfortable.

Thor tries to swallow against it, can’t. Slides a hand up Loki’s arm, toward eir elbow, to break the pressure and then they are play-sparring, there on the bed, arms and limbs reaching for pressure points and joint locks, Loki’s knees bony in his sides and eir wrists curving, clever in his hands, elbows dangerous. Rolling over in the bed, the ceiling and the sheets exchanging places more than once.

They reach the edge of the bed and then they are standing, unarmed, chests heaving and bodies loose-limbed.

Loki, at ease next to the bed, lit up with the joy of play-fighting, spreads eir hands. Eir eyes are wicked with enjoyment, eir feet shoulder-width apart. Thor cannot tell if ey is hard, not yet.

“You can’t fight _or_ fuck me from there,” ey says, “and I do believe it’s your turn to attack.”

 

**TWENTY-THREE**

When asked about how, occasionally, ey will give catty remarks to reporters who catch em in unofficial moments, the Throne-Consort of Asgard grows serious and says, _It’s a testament to the persistence of the media; I see honor in their diligence and their pursuit of story. It’s a cultural and ethical standpoint which I respect deeply, as so much of it is driven by the urge to embarrass the proud and bring low the hypocritical._

After the reporter leaves, flushed with pride at the flattery, Thor says, “Was that an insult or a compliment?”

Loki’s mouth twists. “Married for a thousand years and you can’t tell. I’m insulted.”

 

**TWENTY-FOUR**

The lodge at the estate on Jotunheim is quiet but for the ever-blowing wind and the sound of the waves crashing far below against the cliff-stones. Loki does not think much of it, except as a place to escape the intrigues of the court, but – well, Ilmr can handle it. Ilmr will handle it, because they have trained her as well as they can, and only practice will allow her to do better.

The smell of the fish that they caught and grilled for their supper lingers still in the air, and the fire crackling in the hearth gives off the smell of brine. Loki curls tighter against Thor, into his warmth: Jotunheim’s winter is cold even to the Jotun.

 

**TWENTY-FIVE**

It takes Ilmr half an hour to find her grandfather. He sits on an arched bridge over the river, dangling a fishing line into the water. He wears a long, grey, ragged cloak; with a pronounced slouch, he is almost unrecognizable as the King-Who-Was.

She sits down beside him, sweeping her skirt under her as she does so. “Grandfather,” she says.

“What brings you here?”

“I have a question.”

“Ah.” He turns his head, even though this will not help him see her better: she is on his good side. “Ask it, then. The fish do not care for my lures today.”

“Do they ever?” Ilmr asks, knowing well that they do not. There are no fish in this part of the river. Further upstream, where the river begins, there are trout, and in some seasons there are salmon, which of course pass through here.

“Ask me your question, then.”

“I’ve heard rumors,” she begins, and fights to control her hands, that they not play with things as she speaks. It is a betraying habit. Both her parents have said so. “That your mother was not. Is not. Of this land.”

“A strange rumor,” Odin says. “Do I have a reason to answer your question, and answer it truthfully?”

Ilmr bows her head. “If you didn’t care for my feelings, then you wouldn’t answer it. Because if Queen Bestla were Æsir, then the rumor is false, and you have nothing to hide and no reason to be ashamed before Court. But if she were Jotun, as some faint, old rumors hold, then you are at risk of being perceived as illegitimate, and the line might pass to your half-brothers, rather than to me.”

“What answer would I give, if I did not care for you?”

“You would say she was beautiful, and golden. Regardless of truth.”

“Good.” Her grandfather nods, and puts a hand on her shoulder. “And that is why I will tell you: she does not still live. And if she were Æsir, then you are as you are. And if she were Jotun, then you are still as you are, half-Jotun and half-Æsir. The ratio is irrelevant. You are as legitimate an heir to the throne of Asgard as your cousin is in Jotunheim to the throne there.”

“I see.” Ilmr rises from the stone, brushing off the back of her skirt. “Thank you.” She doesn’t see the lesson he wanted her to see. She sees that he doesn’t understand why she asked.

 

**TWENTY-SIX**

Róta doesn’t command the Valkyries, because ey is no woman, though ey has trained with them before. Ilmr had command handed to her, and while she understands how things work from the logistics point of view, only Róta knows the name of every woman-warrior at Court, and every other warrior too. Only ey knows how many children Hildólfr has, and by which of his four successive wives.

And in turn they love em. Ilmr is thought wise, and brave, and they trust her with their fortunes and their lives: but they would ride to glory only with Róta, and only with em at the head of their forces.

 

**TWENTY-SEVEN**

Ilmr goes in her father’s stead on a diplomatic visit to Alfheim. He has no pressing business at home, but he went last year to Alfheim, and this is merely a goodwill visit, expressing congratulations to the Queen’s daughter-heir on the birth of her first daughter. It will be politic that Ilmr, herself an heir to one of the Nine Realms, attend the festivities.

The Queen has many daughters, six or seven in all, which is what Ilmr uses as her excuse for not recognizing the princess Aglaeca, who is a smith of some renown even outside Alfheim, at first sight.

She should have known, of course: who else would have muscles like that, and burn-scars peppered across her skin? 

That, and she is wearing jewellery: a fine metal chain twined around her throat, and two heavy brooches at her shoulders, ornamented with a design of anvils and tongs and fire. Even her cloak has fine metal threads woven in, and her hair is braided back, to keep it out of the way as she works.

Ilmr manages to cover her own gaffe well enough – it is not the first time she has met people of importance without introduction – and also manages to control her tongue well enough to not fall into the gibbering awkward rambling of attraction. Not for the first time, she is grateful to her bearer for eir example.

This of course goes all to pieces when Aglaeca, later that night, invites her to see the royal mints. Ilmr accepts. Accepts, and –

In the princess’s private smithing-corner of the royal smithies, of which the mint is only a small portion, Aglaeca, after showing Ilmr a fine brooch with a design of dragons among thistles, offers it to her.

“I –“ Ilmr says, taken aback. “I would wear it gladly.”

+++

By the third night of Ilmr’s visit they are kissing, Aglaeca sitting upon her own anvil to reconcile their height difference, Ilmr leaning over her. It is improper in the extreme. 

The women of Alfheim are the more powerful sex, and so there is no reason for Aglaeca – five sisters between herself and the throne – not to have publicly acknowledged lovers, but Ilmr…

The sixth night, Ilmr declines to lie with her, and on the seventh returns to Asgard, and writes a letter.

It is returned only a day later. Aglaeca’s hand is sharp and uncompromising, and Ilmr thinks it fits her well.

At six months, Ilmr goes to Alfheim for three days, and upon her return goes to the weaving halls.

Her bearer is not there. It is a relief.

She sits down beside her grandmother, and does not touch the weaving. Things of magic made of once-living things grow strange in her hands: wool cloaks spelled for Jotunheim’s warmth begin to fray, growing horns out of the buttonholes and the wool thickening, sometimes developing skin; weavers’ staves made of wood put down roots and grow again, in strange twisted patterns with fruit unlike any other; and once a woven tapestry of seeing went awry, the pattern changing every night as the futures multiplied and grew away from what the weaving had been meant to foretell into being.

(She had thought her bearer might bar her from the weaving chambers forever, or send her to Jotunheim for a year, but instead ey had laughed and taken her hand and set it on the fabric again, watching the patterns shift beneath her fingers, and sat her on eir lap and said, “Little one, it is no shame when plans go awry; it is when one fails to use the changes that is the shame.”)

“How was Alfheim?” asks her grandmother.

“It was well.” Ilmr breathes against her shame and says, “I am worried.”

“Oh?”

“I am…” she curls her mouth around the words that follow, and then dismisses them. “I am courting the Princess Aglaeca, of Alfheim, but I am unsure it is wise.”

Her grandmother glances up at her, then returns to her weaving. “The smith.”

“Yes.”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

Ilmr slides a hand along her own thigh, pressing down on the muscle. “My father is as of Asgard as could be hoped. I wear my Jotun heritage in my siblings, and in cold temperatures, and I am a woman who will someday rule. I worry that if I were to succeed in my suit, that my heirs would not…be accepted. As legitimately of Asgard.”

Her grandmother is silent for long moments. “Before your parents were married, Thor swore to never sire bastards, because it would tempt the Court to rebellion, into replacing the legitimate heirs of his marriage.”

Ilmr takes in a breath. She had always thought it was for love, that her parents were too wrapped up in each other to think of others. Perhaps not, or perhaps they have learned to love each other, as so many of the marriages at Court have.

“And Loki has taken pains to make emself seen as…working in Asgard’s interests. Or in working to coordinate Asgard’s interests with those of Jotunheim, in Asgard’s favor. To make emself, and by extension you, more plausibly loyal.”

“My loyalty is –“ Ilmr begins, a reflex, and then falls silent.

“Your right to succeed to the throne is not under question,” Grandmother says. “You can make any children you care to have, equally unquestionable. It might take work. But it will be possible.”

Ilmr crosses her arms over her chest. “That is well, then.”

“Your bearer might give different advice.”

“Yes,” Ilmr says. “Ey would.” Would tell her to disdain anyone who cared to disagree with her choices, and bribe or flatter or ruin those who rose up against her until the land was steady beneath her hands, waiting for her chosen heir. “Thank you.”

She goes then to her chambers, and writes three letters. One to her father, saying, _I am paying court to, and being courted by, the sixth daughter of the Queen of Alfheim: Aglaeca, known as a skilled smith. Be not wary of our allies there, but if the match is not seen in our favor, only tell me._

To her bearer, she writes, knowing too that her parents will read each other’s letters, _You will already know who has my favor. I will make the Æsir lords swallow their outrage, and have my own lovers of my own choice._

To Aglaeca, she writes, _You are always welcome here_.

 

**(and one)**

Frigga rests her hand against Odin's cheek, her palm warmed with the touch. Beard scratches against her calluses.

She sighs softly, and lets herself be enfolded in her husband's _(spouse's)_ arms.


End file.
